NO BUDGET CAN be judged in isolation. The baseline question is: compared to what?
Republicans will make much of President Obama’s failure to fulfill his promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Given the shaky recovery, he’s right to break that promise. The short-term goal must be economic growth, not deficit-trimming. Taming the ever-growing pile of debt is a longer-term challenge.
On that goal, measured against his own fiscal commission, Mr. Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 falls short. At the end of the 10-year budget window, he would have the national debt at a disturbing 76.5 percent of gross domestic product. By comparison, the debt reduction plan envisioned by the Simpson-Bowles commission would reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio close to a more manageable, if still unhealthy, 60 percent.
Birthers are so 2011 — meet the "transcripters," who fervently believe Obama was a lousy student and vow not to rest until you know how he did in school 30 years ago...
Rock superstar Elton John had some harsh words for Madonna on Australian television yesterday. “She’s such a nightmare. Her career’s over…she looks like a f–king fairground stripper,” EOnline reports.
In what is surely to get many of his liberal celebrity friends (is there any other kind?) bent out of shape, Elton John recently also spoke well of his new friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host.
While Rush Limbaugh cut right to the chase on Chick-fil-A, calling out the "Stalinist" tactics of several big-city mayors for their "direct assault on Christianity," the inimitable Mark Steyn was busy with a fine-point pen.
Referring to a Chicago alderman's opposition to Chick-fil-A opening a restaurant in his ward because the company president, who is a Christian, recently stated his support for traditional marriage and opposition to gay marriage, Steyn writes:
...in a city with an Aurora-sized body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants...
The city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent "Chicago values" - which is true if by "Chicago values" you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors, and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates.
"These people are referring to a man who introduced a health care plan based on Republican ideas, who wants to raise taxes on the top two percent of income earners, and who has proposed nearly the same Middle East solution as his predecessor George W. Bush, and comparing him to Adolph Hitler. How can that possibly make sense to anyone? How can people hold such thoughts in their head and not wonder at their own sanity?" -from "Chasing Glenn Beck: A Personal Experiment in Reclaiming Our Hijacked Political Conversation"
Even Bill O’Reilly is getting on the “Restoring Love” bandwagon. The O’Reilly” Factor host had Glenn Beck on to discuss his upcoming event, or as O’Reilly joking called it, “Beckstock.” The interview proceeded with the typical variety of lighthearted banter one would come to expect from O’Reilly and Beck during their Fox News days as dueling anchors, with O’Reilly continually showing his suspicion that “Restoring Love,” which will be broadcast exclusively on TheBlazeTV/GBTV this Saturday, July 28, was really for hippies.
What I find most fascinating about Michele Bachmann — and there are many, many more where she came from — is that she presents herself as a godly woman, humbly devoted to her Christian faith. I’d like to meet that god, and I’d like to understand that Christianity.
Does it call for smearing people on the basis of flimsy conspiracy theories? That’s what Bachmann just did to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by essentially suggesting she might be a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Does it endorse scaring young women away from immunizations that could spare them serious illness? Bachmann did that during her memorable presidential campaign, when she blithely drew an unsubstantiated link between a vaccine for the human papillomavirus and mental retardation.
Does it encourage gratuitously divisive condemnations of Barack Obama as “anti-American,” one of many incendiary phrases in her attacks against him in 2008? And does it compel a war against homosexuality waged with the language and illogic she uses?
Senate Republicans are charging Democrats with embracing the nuclear option in their move to alter the filibuster.
by HUMBERTO SANCHEZ, Roll Call
Senate Republicans are charging Democrats with embracing the “nuclear option” in their move to alter the filibuster.
Stepping up their defense of the parliamentary maneuver and looking to claim the political high ground, Republicans are attempting to brand Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) effort with the same rhetoric Democrats used in 2005, when the then-majority GOP Conference threatened to change the rules. It was an attempt to prevent Democrats from filibustering President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, and at the time, Republicans defended the effort by calling it the “constitutional option.”
“It’s exactly the same move,” said a senior Republican Senate aide, who added that the “nuclear option is a radical” departure from regular order...
Rachel Maddow tore into Rush Limbaugh on her MSNBC show Monday after the conservative talk show host suggested that the upcoming Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises" took a shot at presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
The architect of former President George W. Bush’s controversial 2000 and 2004 campaigns is calling on President Barack Obama to stop using “gutter politics” to suggest presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney could be guilty of a felony by lying about when he left Bain Capital.
After The Boston Globe revealed on Thursday that Romney was listed as the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” of Bain even after he claimed he had retired in 1999, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter noted that lying on SEC filings was a felony.
Rove on Sunday said the Obama campaign had crossed the line with that suggestion and insisted that the notion Romney was involved with Bain after 1999 was “total baloney.”
Add influential conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to the crowd of conservatives dismayed about Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul's off-message comments on Fox Newsthis morning. Limbaugh said on his radio show that Saul flubbed the proper response to a controversial pro-Obama super PAC ad. Meanwhile, Coulter went on Hannity tonight and suggested that Saul should be fired.
Earlier today on Fox News, Saul said that if the steelworker, Joe Soptic, had lived in Massachusetts, he and his wife would have been able to get health insurance under Romney's health-care reform legislation.7f
Public Citizen, Common Cause and U.S. PIRG announced Monday that more than 100,000 signatures had been collected for a Colorado ballot measure calling for the controversial Citizens United ruling to be overturned.
“Our elected officials are supposed to serve the voters, not the highest bidder,” Aquene Freechild, the senior organizer of Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign, said in a statement. “Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, Super PACs and other independent groups have spent huge amounts, in some cases outspending individual campaigns by a ratio of 2-to-1.”
The ballot measure, Initiative 82 (PDF), would urge Colorado’s congressional delegation to support an amendment to the U.S. constitution that allows Congress to limit outside campaign spending. The ballot measure says the amendment is necessary to “ensure that all citizens, regardless of wealth, can express their views to one another and their government on a level playing field.” [MORE]
The protesters also told TheBlaze that Westboro refused to engage them, as they simply sang spoof songs and spouted some of their regular messaging. Here’s what Westboro posted on its website prior to the event unfolding:Glenn Beck despises God, and he proudly says so. He climbs on WBC backs to have an issue for his radio program.
God has Smacked Glenn Beck already, giving him a little child with disease, but that doesn’t even slow Beck down. He is wholly incapable of seeing the Hand of God at work in this earth, and he flatly refuses to give the Glory of God’s work, TO GOD! He worships Mr. Peanut, a god that has no power, and worse
WBC will be at Cowboys Stadium where Beck will be inside hocking his false religious system and his rebellion against God to some other rebels agianst God, and we will warn the living to flee from that place, lest you should become a partaker of Glenn Beck’s sin.
1Ti 5:22 Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other mens sins: keep thyself pure.
[Almost makes me wish I'd been there just to see this! - MC]
Rocker Ted Nugent offered his opinion on the July 20 shooting at a showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Colorado, discouraging stricter gun laws and suggesting armed moviegoers might have quelled the massacre.
“We pray for all victims&loved ones of demonshooter in CO& we SALUTE the brave warriors who saved lives IF only they would hav had a good gun,” Nugent posted on his Twitter page Wednesday.
Rapper/actor Ice-T is none-too-pleased that Rush Limbaugh (and other pundits) are using his anti-gun control comments to advance their pro-gun message. He had some choice words on Twitter for Rush & Co.
Here's the first right-wing conspiracy theory about the shootings that killed 12 people and injured dozens more at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, over the weekend.
All indications from the Aurora Police Department are that Batman gunman James Holmes acted alone, for reasons that have yet to be established. But Larry Pratt—the president of Gun Owners of America, a far-right Second Amendment group that's backed by prominent people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—has a different theory. Pratt believes the timing of Holmes' rampage, which left 12 people dead and 58 wounded, seemed designed to coincide with the upcoming negotiation of the United Nations Small Arms Treaty. A press release sent out to radio bookers on Tuesday advertising Pratt's availability noted that, "In an article posted at The New American…one expert even outlined a theory that Holmes didn't act alone, but was possibly 'enlisted' to carry out his violent act." Pratt, the publicist stated, was free for interviews on Holmes' "impeccable" timing.
To combat calls by both Dems and Repubs for Romney's tax returns, the Tea Party Nation head demands that O rebut a convicted con artist and release college transcripts. In so doing, he falls back on dog whistle racism. Crack? Well, you how black people like crack. O got into Harvard? Couldn't have been his intelligence; must have been because he's black.
Of course, not all Tea Partiers are racist. But when the leaders are, you can't credibly deny that there is a substantial racist element in their midst.
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